Microsoft “net-bans” a million modified Xbox 360s: My Prediction
Monday, November 16th, 2009Microsoft warns of banned Xbox 360 consoles for sale on eBay
The comments section here is quite interesting; it illustrates that a large number of (presumed) Canadians are seemingly unable to comprehend the definition of the word copyright. I think that, in light of this apparent ignorance, as we approach a time in which essentially everyone is connected to high-speed internet at all times, a fundamental change in the way that we pay for software rights is bound to occur. We have already seen some examples, such as with the game Company of Heroes, for which an internet connection is required to play the game at all (even single player). More strikingly, in China (where software piracy is rampant [not to mention other piracy]), the popular game World of Warcraft is essentially free (I think it costs ten Yuan or something ridiculously trivial, and it might even include a time credit, in order to get users “hooked”), but users have to pre-pay for playtime.
In the future, I think it’s possible that almost all software will perform a license check before starting (and perhaps periodically while running), and users may be subject to a use based charge, although the software itself might be free. Companies might be able to combat the piracy of say, an office program (which, if pirated, could create documents independently), by having the software that a given client is using first grab a key from a server. Then, only documents that were created by genuine versions of the office program could be accessed by other genuine versions, or shared. Of course, this all would require many agreements between software firms in order to work, as certain office programs would have to be compatible with the files of others, but I’m confident that some sort of “ISO” type standards organisation could handle such a task. It certainly will be interesting to see how accurate this prediction turns out to be in, say, ten to fifteen years.